The death in a United Nations prison over the weekend of Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian leader who became known for his atrocities as the Butcher of the Balkans, is a moment to reflect on the folly of relying on the United Nations for justice. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, based at the Hague in the Netherlands, was an embarrassment even before Milosevic’s death. The tribunal has a staff of about 1,146 and an annual budget of about $135 million a year. This has brought a grand total of 161 indictments in its 12-year history. By way of comparison, the district attorney of New York County, Robert Morgenthau, gets by with a smaller staff than the tribunal and a far smaller annual budget, and his office investigates and prosecutes more than 100,000 cases a year. And with great success and credibility.

Milosevic was helicoptered to the Hague on June 29, 2001. That more than four and a half years wasn’t long enough to present and try a case against one of the most notorious war criminals in recent history is a testament to the flaws in the United Nations’ administration of justice. As a dispatch from the Associated Press pointed out yesterday, “By comparison, the Allied tribunal at Nuremberg took less than a year to try, convict, sentence and hang the 10 top Nazi defendants following World War II.” Milosevic’s trial took so long that not only did the defendant die before it concluded, so did one of the judges.

The inefficiency of this particular U.N. tribunal has been a scandal for years. As chairman of the House International Relations Committee, Rep. Henry Hyde convened a hearing on February 28, 2002, in which he raised the question of “whether the tribunals could be better managed.” At that hearing, the Bush administration’s ambassador for war crimes issues, Pierre-Richard Prosper, testified to Congress that in both the Yugoslavia tribunal and one with a separate budget charged with Rwanda war crimes, “there have been problems that challenge the integrity of the process … the professionalism of some of the personnel have been called into question with allegations of mismanagement and abuse. In both tribunals, the process at times has been costly, lacked efficiency, has been too slow and has been too removed from the everyday experience of the people and the victims.”

Apologists for the United Nations sought to belittle the criticism. In a news article the New York Times headlined “Experts Dispute Bush Aide’s Criticism of War Crimes Panels,” an official of Human Rights Watch, an organization that can be relied on to side with the United Nations against the Bush administration, called the ambassador’s comments “totally incomprehensible” and a “smear campaign.” The article quoted a spokeswoman for Secretary General Annan as saying Mr. Annan rejected any allegations of mismanagement, and it reported that “in Strasbourg, France, the 43-nation Council of Europe condemned what it called unacceptable American pressure and attempts to interfere with international justice.” The author of the Times news article later left the paper and entered a deal to write a weekly column “sponsored” by Ted Turner’s U.N. Foundation.

By our lights, the slowness and expense of the U.N. tribunals make the challenges to them entirely comprehensible, the difficulties in comprehending them by the geniuses at Human Rights Watch notwithstanding. Had the experts been less quick to fall into a defensive crouch and more willing to react to the Bush administration’s justified criticism, perhaps Milosevic could have been put to justice before he expired of what appear to be natural causes, though even there, dispute will linger over the his death while in the hands of the United Nations.

These problems, moreover, pale beside the scandal of who serves on the United Nations tribunal. Some of the Serbs have been judged, for example, by jurists from Communist China. We don’t mean to belittle the butchery committed in the Balkans when we say that Communist China’s record makes Milosevic look like Mother Teresa. It took an American-led military and diplomatic effort to finally bring peace to the Balkans. If the people of former Yugoslavia are not up to trying their war criminals themselves, the next best option would be doing it here in America, where trials move with greater dispatch and have far greater credibility. Had these cases been given over to, say, Robert Morgenthau to prosecute, it’s a safe bet that Milosevic would have, before he slipped our grasp, met his match.

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In July 2002, a U.N. permanent organ established as replacement for temporary tribunals like the ones set up for the Balkans and Rwanda, the International Criminal Court, became active. America strongly opposes the ICC, which has already opened cases related to war crimes in Uganda and Congo. And despite its opposition, America has accepted a Security Council resolution that referred to the ICC cases related to the Darfur genocide. Although the ICC has been active for three and a half years, however, it has yet to try its first case. We guess it is waiting for accusations of war crimes perpetrated by an American or an Israeli to start working in earnest.